


Just Call Me

by vtn



Category: Green Day
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-01
Updated: 2005-04-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 12:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The particular three words rocketing around in my head like loose bolts happened to have been said to me last night. As an afterthought. As I was handed a piece of paper with quickly scrawled, hardly readable numbers. <i>Just call me.</i> - Billie and Mike meet for the first time as teenagers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Call Me

**Author's Note:**

> Original notes: _Includes drug use in the form of a very high and rambly Billie Joe, and a few mentions of sex toys. And it was written in the midst of me having a head cold, so it's a bit...what can I say...odd._
> 
>  
> 
> Ahaha this was the story with the 'rock collection'

Things come in threes. Not necessarily the best things, or however the saying goes. Just the important ones, it seems. There are, of course, the famous three words, and then there’s another set of three words that, despite not being such a permanent-sounding thing, still manage to crawl under your skin and infect you with this odd disease which, considering the fact that they’ve named such things as depression and anxiety as diseases, you figure this one should be too. This one has more of the sort of symptoms that point to critical conditions too. I should be able to skip school and stay bedridden all day for it, for that matter. There’s certainly a few prescribed cures, one of which I know lies in the cardboard box on the top shelf of my closet, in the box labeled “My Rock Collection”. No, I’m not so sentimental as to hold onto my childhood rock collection through high school—that box is hiding something even I’ve been too scared to touch. After a friend gave it to me; I picked it up with two fingers and shoved it in the box, so that it serves less of an actual purpose and more as a reminder that yes, it does _have_ a purpose and it is there _if_.

Anyway—three words.

The particular three words rocketing around in my head like loose bolts happened to have been said to me last night. As an afterthought. As I was handed a piece of paper with quickly scrawled, hardly readable numbers.

_Just call me._

My first response was to think of that stupid song, and I wondered why someone would bring it up at an odd moment like that. And I started humming it, which was answered with a slap to the cheek. (The one on my face, ya perv.) And then it was like someone fast forwarded the tape that was my life, and I was left at the end of the scene, missing the in between bits, holding onto that scrap of paper that had been pushed into the palm of my hand by sweaty, dirty fingers. _His_ fingers.

He played bass, I remembered. So those same fingers could dance up and down the coiled metal strings and pull them back in swift, deft movements and bring forth grooving twisting tripping melodies that floated around through your innards and hummed in your groin, a no-hands vibrator.

Wait, what the hell was I thinking? I’d never even formed the word ‘vibrator’ in my head before, because though it was something enticing, it was something taboo. It was The Thing In The Closet, _definitely_ not a tangible, real concept, and definitely not something I should be relating to Mike’s fingers. I mean Mike’s bass. His fingers playing the bass, there we go.

But still. I’d just thought about his fingers and my groin in one sentence together. Fingers, groin, fingers, groin, bass, vibrator. I was sort of subconsciously forming the words with my mouth as I thought them.

“You’re high,” I said out loud, through parched lips. “You’re high, Billie Joe.” High and dry, that’s what they say, right? High and dry and desperately thirsty and desperately wanting another, deeper, stranger thirst to be quenched.

Imagine the camera shifts to an aerial perspective, and from out of the mountain of tangled sheets (hiding all under it except a pair of dark eyes with bloodshot whites) rises an arm, an arm that reaches up like some strange grime-covered undersea creature emerging from the deep. The arm periscopes around a bit, and finally slams down on a telephone that’s sitting next to the bed.

I didn’t need to look at the scrap of paper. The numbers spun around in my head like they were ticker tape tattooed onto the insides of my eyelids. I dialed them into the phone receiver and put the phone up to my ear, listening to the hollow rings on the other side.

Then I heard his voice.

This is what you would hear if you were sitting where my imaginary camera in my imaginary movie is sitting; on my ceiling or maybe the end of my bed. They might have been attached, my bed and the ceiling. The image in my head (my eyes still being underneath the covers) said that the end of the bed swooped up in a curve that ended with the ceiling of the room; actually that all sides of the bed did, thus meaning I was trapped in a big circle of curvy swoopy bed, trapped until I finished this phone call. At least that’s what my mind’s eye (my high and dry mind’s eye) saw.

So this is what you would hear.

“Mike…Mike…it’s me.

“I mean, me, Billie, Billie Joe, Billie Joe Armstrong. You know, the Billie Joe from…yeah, uh-huh, Billie Joe.

“You gave me your number last night.

“You were going to talk to me, talk to me about…I don’t even know. You wanted to talk to me about something.

“Yeah, about music.

“About…so yeah, m-hmm, I play guitar.

“A little punk rock, no I mean a lot of punk rock…no, I mean only punk rock. Pretty much. Yeah, I have. Have written a few songs. And you play bass. Bass and I play guitar and I wrote a few songs so maybe. Idunno.

“Yeah.

“Maybe we could…get together and…”

 _Oh shit._ What had I just said? Told him we could maybe ‘get together’. And before I could explain to him what I meant, the phone beeped in my ear, and I tossed it down, swearing under my breath, then sighing.

I didn’t tell you the other side of the conversation becase, you see, there wasn’t one. And some time tonight (it had to be afternoon by now, considering how late I’d gotten to bed) he would pick up the phone and hear my drugged-up ramblings. Or maybe, the moment he heard my voice, he’d rewind the tape so someone could record over it and send my message into oblivion. Because now I was sure he knew (perhaps even knew better than me) what I was brooding about at the moment.

I’d wanted so badly for him to pick up the phone and talk to me, even if it was just to say “fuck off” or something along those lines. I’d wanted it so badly because (what do you think, honestly?) I wanted him badly.

Tonight I’d never be able to say that to myself. Tonight I’d question whether the here-and-now was just some twisted, drug-induced dream where I wasn’t me but indeed a dream-me, the same sort of me who would end up walking out on the street in his underwear because he just didn’t notice this sort of thing. Wanted him badly? I’d never, oh no that couldn’t have been me who said that. I liked girls anyhow. Loved them. I’d even had a girlfriend up until last Tuesday when she started hanging out with the crowd of kids who usually liked to beat me up for fun. And I was plenty heartbroken, and I asked her on the spot if she actually wanted to hang out with those kids, and I admit her argument (‘I can do what I want, and hang out with who I want, and believe what I want to believe, and if you don’t like that then you don’t like me.”) was pretty convincing, but mine (“You’re right, then. I don’t.”) was more so and so it ended. La de da, such is the life of a highschool kid.

And I felt utterly in a rut and so I started doing nothing but going to shows and getting drunk and getting high, and then last night, there I was, drunk and high at a show. And there he was, also probably a little drunk or high, and it was like, well fuck the girl I used to go out with (not literally fuck her, I said it was over and I meant it), because this person is gorgeous.

And it didn’t occur to me until the end of the night that he was a he, and that he went to my school, and that he was called Mike, and that he was a bit of a loner, and that he was in some of my classes but he practically never talked. Those kinds of things. I’d never have guessed he liked going to punk shows, and that he played bass (pretty much the extent of our conversation last night), and I was starting to think maybe, oh, maybe I’d finally found someone like me. And so I told him I thought it was cool that he played bass, and then someone was shouting his name, and he said he had to go and

_Just call me._

But now, I must have blown it. I was still going to go into school Monday, I mean, what else could I do? But I wouldn’t be able to look at him. I sank back into the bed, and the room spun around me. Sleep called.

 

I woke up at 5 PM, mind cleared of the druggy haze. The light on my answering machine was blinking, and I hit play.

“Hey Billie Joe, this is Mike. Great show last night, wasn’t it? Anyhow, yeah, I’d love to get together sometime. I have a whole lot of stuff, music-wise, that I’ve been messing around with in my head. We could…we could rock out.” He laughed softly, almost a giggle. “Well, see ya whenever, hope to hear from ya soon.”

I wrapped the phone cord around my fingers and let his last words echo in my head. I smiled to myself.

“You will.”  



End file.
